Abstrakt:
Numerous sources report that the major reason for ICT-project failure
are people- rather than technical issues. Thus, in order to improve
project success, the most evident thing to do seems to care about the
human factor in ICT projects. This influential “soft”, “fuzzy”, and
“complex” factor, however, has tended to be overlooked, such that a
number of research gaps at the interface between software engineering
and human sciences became apparent and need to be filled. In this talk,
my objective is to raise awareness of the salience of communication
issues in ICT projects and illustrate, what can be done (or what
computer scientists, in particular, can do) scientifically and
practically, to fill the research/practice gaps and concurrently improve
communication, leadership, and teamwork in ICT projects.

Abstrakt:
The widespread adoption of online social networks and location-aware mobile devices has resulted in a continuously increasing amount of published user-generated, geo-tagged content. Typical examples include tweets, check-ins, photo/video uploads, route posts (e.g., taxi rides, running trails). This big geo-social data essentially captures people's everyday interactions between the physical and digital world, and presents immense opportunities for creating added value to domains such as location-based services, smart cities, tourism. In this talk, we will present methods for efficiently handling and effectively analyzing large amounts of such data.

6. 3. 2018

RNDr. Robert Ganian, Ph.D., Algorithms and Complexity Group, TU Wien

Backdoors to Tractability for Constraint Satisfaction

Abstrakt:
Constraint Satisfaction (CSP) is one of the most studied NP-complete
problems, with numerous applications in both theory and practice and
featuring its own dedicated conference. A significant amount of
research has targeted the identification of classes of CSP instances
which are polynomially tractable; this has led to celebrated results
such as Schaefer's Dichotomy Theorem and Bulatov's recent proof of the
Feder-Vardi Dichotomy Conjecture. Such classes of instances are often
called "islands of tractability".

In this talk, we will present techniques and recent developments on
solving CSP instances that lie outside of an island of tractability.
In particular, we will use the notion of "backdoors" to capture the
distance of an instance from an island of tractability and show how
these backdoors can be exploited to obtain algorithms for CSP with
good runtime guarantees.

Abstrakt:
Image classification is one of the most important Computer Vision problems being
addressed by researchers around the world today. Classification is the task of labelling
images with different predefined category labels. These category labels may be based on
some low-level features such as color, texture or shape, but more often, they are based
on high-level features such as semantic description, activity or objects present.

In this talk, I will present the different techniques and recent advances in image
classification and retrieval with particular examples from different applications.

27. 3. 2018

Ing. Vlad Popovici, M.Sc., Ph.D., PřF MU

Case studies in multimodal biomarker discovery

Abstrakt:
High throughput genomic revolution started almost twenty years ago with the
first in-house printed DNA chips. Since then, various technologies evolved,
allowing the interrogation of the whole (human) genome, proteome,
metabolome, etc., all producing large amounts of data. Bioinformatics tools
and methods evolved to account for all these data modalities with the
current bottleneck being the integration of these perspectives into a more
comprehensive picture. In parallel and completely independent of
bioinformatics, digital pathology also witnessed significant advances
fuelled mostly by technological developments: slide scanners and
computational infrastructure. However, both “classical” bioinformatics and
digital pathology/bioimaging are often used to investigate the same
biological phenomenon. It is, therefore, natural to attempt to combine
these two seemingly incompatible fields with the hope of unveiling new
connections between them. In this talk we will look at three examples of
jointly mining the transcriptome and the histopathology images in the
context of breast and colon cancers. We will also discuss the computational
challenges one faces when working with these data.

Abstrakt:
In my note, I would like to discuss some legal issues related to development
and use of autonomous robots. One of obvious problems is liability. Robots do
not have legal personalities, so it is questionable who and for what should be
liable when a robot causes harm (physical or other - e.g. through
discriminatory decisions). In real life, this issue translates mostly to
compliance and modelling insurance schemes that technically define basic
parameters of respective markets. In addition, I would like to briefly discuss
legal barriers to use of different types of data for development or operations
of robots. In that regards, we need complex legal solutions (not necessarily
legislation - e.g. contractual data trusts) to overcome complicated and
differentiated legal obstacles that prevent pooling and use of data from
different jurisdictions within the EU and offshore.

Abstract:
Functional neurological symptoms (FNS) are somatic symptoms that still remain poorly understood. Their diagnosis is made by exclusion of organic cause and therefore does not provide any specific cues for the subsequent treatment. Virtual reality (VR) seems to be mature enough to be experimentally tested as a potential therapeutic intervention for the functional neurological disorders. Biofeedback is the process of gaining greater awareness of many physiological functions primarily using instruments that provide information on the activity of those same systems, with a goal of being able to manipulate them at will. Some of the processes that can be controlled include brainwaves, muscle tone, skin conductance, heart rate and pain perception.

This presentation will evaluate immersive virtual reality as a potential therapeutic tool for a treatment of functional neurological symptoms. The first part will examine the effects of immersive virtual reality intervention on changes in autonomic arousal in FNS (in both healthy subjects and patients) by introducing emotional stress. The effect of immersion manipulation on changes in emotional reactivity to stress inducing stimuli is assessed by measuring skin conductance and heart rate variability. The second part will examine how biofeedback affects immersive virtual reality intervention on effective connectivity patterns in patients with FNS.

Short biography:
Dr. Fotis Liarokapis is an Associate Professor at the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. His research interests include: virtual reality, augmented reality, brain-computer interfaces and serious games. He has contributed to more than 100 refereed publications and has more than 2200 citations (h-index: 23 and i10-index: 43). He has secured more than €1,000,000 from a number of national and international research projects. Finally, he is the co-founder of VS-Games conference and has organised numerous conferences and journal special issues. For more information visit: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~liarokap/,